THE CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the fireplace of the Crown & Engine, which has never once gone out.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm.

I am a fireplace, and before I was a fireplace I was a boiler, and before that I was iron in the ground, and I remember none of it and I am not going to pretend I do. Objects that claim to remember being ore are showing off.

I live in the wall of the Crown & Engine, on the village green, half a day out of Saltgate, and I am, I will say this once and plainly, a very good fire. I draw like a spring tide. The maps pinned to the wall beside me curl slowly northward over the course of an evening, and every morning the landlord flattens them out again, and every evening I curl them again, and this arrangement has suited us both for longer than he has been alive.

There are three old miners who sit at the end of the bench and argue about the name of this inn every market day, and have done for thirty years. I could not tell you why the inn is called what it is called. I am the fireplace. Nobody consults the fireplace.

I have never gone out. I would like that noted, not boasted — noted, the way you note a good roof or an honest measure. Nobody here remarks on it. There are things in this realm you do not remark on, and I am grateful to be one of them.

This is the story of the night of the flood, which was also the night of Barnaby Glibb, and in fairness to everyone involved, including the water, it is difficult to say which of the two rose faster.

The flood came the way floods come to Sogmarsh, which is to say politely, and without any real novelty. The river put its elbow on the bank about tea-time. By dark the green was a lake, the Long Bench outside was an island for hens, and the water was up to the windowsills and standing at the door like a large patient dog that intends to be let in eventually and can wait.

Inside, we had the usual congregation of a bad night. The landlord, wiping a glass, because the world may end but the glass will be wiped. The three miners, mid-argument. Two drovers whose cattle were on the high pasture and whose boots were not. A shepherd asleep sitting up, which is a shepherd's one great art. A reed-cutter and his wife and their girl, a small serious person of about seven, who had been promised the flood was ordinary so many times that she had stopped believing it, the way you do.

And in the corner, with his pint and his chalk, old Phineas Vance, the surveyor that was, who says we all live on a raft and seems pleased about it. Floods do not trouble Vance. To Vance a flood is simply the raft agreeing with him.

At the darkest end of the evening there was a knock at the door — which was remarkable, the door being half underwater — and the landlord opened the top of it, and there, standing chest-deep in the flood with his battered leather case held above his head like the crown jewels of a small damp nation, his smile arriving a full three seconds before the rest of him, was Barnaby Glibb.

Of Glibb & Sons, Brokerage, Drainage, and Final Defeasance.

Somebody at the bench said a word I shall not repeat, because I am a respectable fire.

"We're shut," said one of the drovers, hopefully.

"We are an inn," said the landlord, and let him in, because that is the whole law of this parish and nobody gets to be an exception to it, not even Glibb.

He came over my hearthstones leaving a wake. He steamed in front of me — I did what I could; a fire has standards even for salesmen — and while he steamed, he counted the room. I watched him do it. Eyes going from face to face, twinkling like a man greeting beloved family, and behind the twinkle, an abacus.

Then he climbed, with great ceremony, onto a chair.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Barnaby Glibb, dripping, beaming, hand upon his heart. "What a fortunate turn of events."

"Oh no," said the second miner.

"Most people," Glibb went on, "pay good money for a captive audience — and here we all are, conveniently gathered, with nowhere to be until the waters… conclude their business. Now. While we wait. I happen to have about my person a small number of exceptional opportunities that will not wait, and it would be a dereliction — a dereliction, madam — if I kept them from you."

And he opened the case, and the case, I am sorry to report, had stayed dry.

You will want a sample. Very well. I heard the whole of it; you may have the cream.

Item one: a generous parcel of the Nettlewick Waste. "Practically a blank canvas! A tremendous sky-to-land ratio! You'll have heard the soil dissolves an iron boot in a fortnight — and that, my friends, is natural mineral exfoliation, a spa treatment other realms would bottle."

Item two: a charming cottage with a self-cooling cellar. "Been keeping itself cool since 1802. Not one farthing spent on ice. You cannot buy efficiency like that — well. You can. Tonight. From me."

Item three — and here he looked, with great warmth, at the water coming under the door — "for the gentleman who seemed anxious earlier: a stilt property of real character. Slightly used. One previous drowning, fully resolved, and I am authorised — tonight only — to offer flood terms: nothing to pay until we are rescued. Nothing at all to pay," and his voice went reverent, "if we are not."

The three miners heckled him the way you would water a garden — steadily, thoroughly, with a sense of civic duty. He took every heckle like a bouquet. The first miner said the only dry thing in Sogmarsh was Glibb's paperwork; Glibb had the paperwork out before the sentence ended. "Feel that, sir. Bone dry. That is the quality I bring."

He tried Vance, of course. He got as far as "a gentleman of your discernment—" and Vance looked up from his pint, kindly, and said:

"Son, you are selling deck-chairs on my raft."

"Promenade seating," said Glibb, without a heartbeat's pause, and even the second miner laughed, and hated himself, and laughed anyway.

Some time after midnight there came a second knocking, at the upstairs window this time, and a wet rosette, and a voice asking with tremendous dignity whether any elected office was present in the building, as he was standing for it. He was given a mug of tea out the window and directed onward to Peatdike. He thanked the whole room, hand on heart, called the flood "frankly an opportunity," and waded away, and Glibb watched him go with the look of one craftsman watching another, and said, quietly, to nobody, "there goes an honest man," which remains the most alarming sentence I have ever heard spoken in this room.

Now here is the part of the story that is the reason I am telling it.

There is an hour, on a flood night, that the almanacs do not warn you about. The middle one. The lamps are low to save oil. The talk has run out. The water has not. It comes up a stair like something patient learning arithmetic — and that is the hour the room goes quiet, and everybody privately does the sums on the roof beams, and nobody says anything, because saying it would make it true.

In that hour the reed-cutter's girl sat awake by my hearth with her knees under her chin, watching the water's edge the way you watch a strange dog.

And Barnaby Glibb — who had sold nothing all night, to nobody, and had been told so, with increasing affection, by everyone — got down off his chair, and sat on my hearthstones beside her, and said, in a voice pitched for two people and no farther:

"Now then. You strike me as a woman of property."

And he sold her a house.

Not a real one. Not even one of his, which is saying something. He built it for her out of nothing at all, there on my hearthstones, at the worst hour of the night: a dry parlour — "bone dry, mind; you'll want for nothing" — with window boxes, and a stubborn little garden, and a bench by the door for her mother, and a cat ("I shall throw in the cat; you drive a hard bargain"), and a copper kettle, and a view of water that stayed outside, in its place, where water belongs, and by the time he got to the brass knocker in the shape of a heron her eyes had gone down, and somewhere between the knocker and the description of the hall stand she was asleep against her mother's arm.

Glibb tucked his catalogue back into the case, with the care of a man shutting up shop for the night, and said to the reed-cutter, quite softly, "No obligation. She can settle up when she's grown," and went and sat by himself, and had, for nearly a quarter of an hour, nothing whatsoever to say.

Nobody remarked on it. There are things in this realm you do not remark on.

I burned. The water came over my grate at four o'clock, and I burned anyway, and if anybody had asked me how, I should have said: it did not seem the night to go out. Nobody asked.

Morning came the way it does after floods, looking extremely pleased with itself, as though it had personally arranged everything. The water went down the green, and off the bench, and out of the door, taking its patience elsewhere. The hens resumed the bench. The maps by my wall had curled clean around themselves in the night, and the landlord flattened them, same as every morning of his life.

Barnaby Glibb totted up a column in his notebook, snapped it shut, and announced to the room that the evening had yielded thirty-one firm expressions of interest — this in a room containing eleven people and a sleeping child — shook the landlord's hand, congratulated us all on our market timing, and waded off east through the receding water toward Drudgeford, where, I am told, there had also been a flood, and therefore, as he would put it, an audience.

He had sold nothing. He had signed nobody. The landlord did not charge him for the chair.

And the three miners, watching him go, suspended the great question of the name of this inn — for the first time in thirty years — long enough for the third one, the one who never says what he thinks, to deliver the entire verdict of the parish of Sogmarsh upon Barnaby "Bargain" Glibb, in nine words:

"Useless article. Hope he's back for the next one."

The moral, since you stayed till morning: on a dry day, mind your signature — but a bad night is kinder to us than we are to each other, and a man who can make one small frightened person look forward to anything is worth his room by the fire, whatever rubbish he is selling. Nobody bought a thing. Nobody asked him to stop. In this parish, that is a good review.